by BK Loren
I had a hard time putting my memory of Brenda together with the words “old lady,” and an even harder time putting her together with Zeb. “I’m tracking her too, then? Zeb’s ‘old lady’?”
“No, no. She’s got some kid from town caring for those animals out there,” he said, pointing toward the paddock I’d seen driving in. “She took off, who knows where. We got nothing on her. Yet.”
“Aiding and abetting,” one man said, brightly.
Polo shook his head. “Aiding and abetting a bunch of guys not doing their goddamn jobs, letting a guy who confessed to murder get away. Not sure we could make that one stick.”
“I don’t see what makes you think the charges against Zeb will stick anyway. Hell, anyone could confess.” I took a risk that surprised me, testing to see if they knew about my own past. “I mean, I could confess to killing someone. That’s not evidence.” I felt the uneasy sound of my own voice pinched in my throat.
Polo’s cheery face turned serious. “Did you kill someone, Miss Robbins? ” He pretended to wait for an answer, then he laughed. “See, that’s the difference. You’re innocent. He’s not. Look, we pretty much have this sonofabitch bagged. It’s just a matter of finding him and taking him in.”
“So.” I shoved my hands in my pockets and waited, stunned into submission by his joke.
“So we get started at the crack of dawn.” Polo reached behind him and tossed me a stuffed duffel bag. “Here’s your gear.”
When I told him I had my own gear and preferred to use it, he shook his head. “Nothing but what we issue you goes on the trek with us. You can leave all your high tech shit in the car.”
“High tech shit?”
“You’re tough. You don’t need that shiny new REI shit.” He tossed his arm around my shoulder. “We share everything, you and me.”
“I prefer to work alone.” I told him “And the bigger footprint we go in with, the less chance we have of actually finding Zeb.”
Polo let out that laugh again, the annoying one that sounded like a flock of starlings. “We already lost your brother. We’re not losing you, too. Anyway, I’m looking forward to working with you, myself. Learning tracking from a master tracker.”
“I’m far from a master tracker.”
“Chance of a lifetime!” He patted my shoulder, then peeled his arm off my back. “Crack of dawn. See you then.” I took my police-issue gear and headed out to set up my tent.
I PASSED BY THE animals, gave them an evening round of hay, and followed the stench of what smelled like death to the far side of the stables, part way up the mountainside. From a distance, I could see the mound of something almost like earth itself. Then the softened shape of a horse came clear, its lose skin folded as if shaped by erosion and weather. As I walked closer, the arc of ribcage and bones protruded like fingers of eroded white rock, somehow making even death seem beautiful on this landscape. I stood next to the carcass of the horse now, covering my nose against the smell. I turned my head, but could not help looking closer.
The horse had been killed by a lion, the scrapes of teeth and claws still visible on the bones. The tracks also told this story: The hungry lion had circled the horse’s carcass, but had been held off, at least for a while. The signs showed that Zeb was vigilant about protecting something that no longer needed protection. The horse was already dead. In tracking, the human body (or a wild animal’s body) tells its story to the earth. Neither is capable of lies. Zeb cared for this horse. He hung onto it even after death. That was the story the signs told. Here was the imprint of Zeb’s capacity for love, the vestiges of the desperation that caring for something this much had left in him. Zeb’s gentleness and grief had always looked like anger and strength.
Prayer had never been my way, at least, not as an adult. Words, especially those that pleaded, had come to seem unholy to me when compared to silence. So I sat quietly beside the horse without praying, without uttering a word inside my head. It was the best way I knew to honor a life. These remains, more than the house and all it contained, told the story of my brother’s life in my absence. I knew Polo and his men were awake and watching me. Even so, I sat there by that stinking horse for some time. I listened to the night coming on.
When the time felt right, I stood up and made my way to the tent site Polo had selected for me. It was only a few feet from him and, thank god, it was upwind from the horse. I set up camp while Polo and his men sat talking, the murmur of their voices a soft buzz, the embers of cigarettes lighting, then going dark, pulsing like tiny red police lights in the night.
I crawled inside my tent, and lay there, waiting. Screech owls and great horned owls carved out tunnels of sound in the wooded silence. My body shivered—the cold earth on my back, or the fear inside me, not sure which. I hadn’t counted on Polo insisting to come with me as I tracked Zeb. It would take every bit of skill I could muster to find Zeb before Polo woke in the morning. My breath fluttered as I closed my eyes, hoping for rest, but not sleep.
IN THE DEEPEST PART of the night, when no seams of daybreak or sunset lightened the horizon in any direction, I set out. I opened the green canvas duffle Polo had given me, pulled on his government issue thermal shirts and flannel lined coveralls. I hated putting them on. They smelled of mothballs and dry-cleaning fluid. The chemical stench of the clothes alone could have announced to any animal that I was approaching. But I knew I had to follow Polo’s directions exactly. And when I turned my mind to tracking, I no longer noticed the stink of my clothes anyway. The night landscape turned intensely lucid. Even from inside the tent, I could smell the change in the weather. I could smell snow. When I unzipped the fly, I saw the huge flakes drifting down, the earth dusted in white. I looked at Polo’s tent. No flashlights, no cigarettes, no lanterns, no sound. They had tracked Zeb day and night at first. But time had worn on. They knew their chances had grown slimmer. They were sleeping fast and hard now, counting on me for their last ditch effort.
I felt half animal now, like I’d drawn the short straw when I was handed my opposable thumb and my too-heavy brain. I tried to shut off my mind and to let my sense of smell and hearing take over. I closed my eyes and listened. Owls calling. Hares moving through the brush. I knew that animals in the wild sounded bigger than they actually were, that people unused to the wilderness will sometimes report the “loud sound” of a “huge animal,” when it turned out to be just a bird flitting from branch to branch. Still, every sound grabbed my attention. The relative quiet of the night amplified everything.
I felt like a cat as I walked up the hill, the way cats keep their haunches flexed with every step so they can walk on the earth without making a noise. Under the moonlight, the trees seemed to move. Their trunks were thick and humanlike, and as I walked, they seemed to bend with me. Maybe they did bend with me; maybe it was something I’d just convinced myself was impossible. You have to believe it to see it. Raymond had always said. He believed boulders, trees, everything in the wilderness had its own mind. That was how it felt to me. Like everything could move, was alive. Like maybe this kind of magic happened all the time and we overlooked it in our daily lives.
When I tracked the wolves back home, the most important thing I did was to think like a wolf. I gave up my logic and let instinct take over, at least, as much as I could, given the limitations of my human brain. Same thing here. I had to slip out of my skin and into Zeb’s. I remembered the scent of him when we were kids—either the metallic, greasy smell of a car shop, or the outdoorsy smell of dried grass and hay. I remembered the sound of his voice, his unpredictable anger, his reticence, his concentration—a fish underwater, I used to say, and no pulling him out if he did not want to come. I tried to put those memories together with the story his cabin told, a gentler life than I ever imagined him living at this age. I tried to fathom the fierceness I’d seen in how he’d cared for that horse. That’s when reality kicked in. I was here tracking my own brother. I was no longer afraid that Polo and his men might be looking for me
or that they planned to use my own past against me. But I was here, tracking Zeb. I had no plan, no way out. Once I found him, I could not turn him in, and I could not let him run. There was also this: In his mind, his trackers would never find him. So what if I found him? What if he reacted violently to being found before I had a chance to tell him who I was? I remembered his fights with Chet. I knew Zeb always carried a gun. I thought of the story he used to tell over and over, the one of the fox he wanted to set free from that trap.
He was on his way down from a backwoods trip in the San Juans near Creede, Colorado, lagging too far behind the Boy Scout troop he had spent the weekend with because he wasn’t ready to come out of the wilderness and go home yet. He spotted this fox from a distance, and it was late September, and the animal was fox-red on the gold aspen leaves, and the blending colors made it hard to see the animal at first. It was lying down, resting, till it set eyes on Zeb. When it saw him, it leapt to its feet and ran at him full speed. But just as quick as it started running, it stopped. It put its butt up in the air, front paws flat on the ground, like a dog asking him to play.
Zeb walked closer. The fox bolted the other direction. But it only ran about six feet or so before it turned back around, bolted at him, then stopped short, just like it had done before. The way it was circling, Zeb thought it might have been rabid. He thought of calling to his scout troop, but Fuck ’em he said. If he had to spend the rest of his life there, in those beautiful mountains, looking at that crazy fox, it would be better than going back to his home in the suburbs.
Then he saw the look in that fox’s eye. Zeb told the story the same way every time. He said as soon as he looked at that fox, he knew it was going to attack him. So he started figuring what to do. “I felt for the knife in my pocket, almost took it out,” he said. That’s when he saw the end of the chain and the trapper’s post in the center. One of the fox’s paws was clamped down in the metal teeth of that thing.
It was one of the few times I’d seen Zeb cry when we were kids. He said, “I could’ve tossed my jacket over that fox, held it tight while I uprooted the post of the trap. Could’ve held its head in the crook of my elbow while I loosened the clamp from its bloodied paw. I could’ve done a dozen things to save that fox.”
While he watched the fox turn itself weak and winded, he cursed the guy who’d set the trap, fox meat not good for eating, and the pelt the only reason for killing it. “And the fuck who set the jaws of that trap was probably sitting comfortable and warm in his house while that beautiful animal died slow.” That’s the way Zeb put it.
He had to make a choice. To take a risk and try to save it, or to move on. He moved on. But the picture of that fox stayed with him. He was halfway down the mountain and the fox was still running in circles inside his head.
He’d heard sometimes an animal will chew off its own foot to get itself free from a trap. He wanted that fox to do that, to free itself. It was just a thought at first, but then he couldn’t stop thinking it, and the thought kept gnawing at him, and he had to go back and see if that fox had had the guts to set itself free.
He went back up the mountain.
That’s the part of the story Zeb had always told people. It made me proud of Zeb, the way he cared about that fox. But the whole story didn’t end where he always ended it.
Zeb went back up the mountain, saw the fox, still trapped. He watched it run in circles for a while. He coaxed it and tried to calm it. He ran with it in circles for a while, tried to tire it so he could maybe get in there and release the trap without the fox biting him.
The fox just kept at it, never wore itself out, even as it was dying. “Gnaw your foot off,” Zeb hollered at the animal. The fox licked at the wounds already there from the clamp. It bit down on the steel chain.
“Gnaw it off,” Zeb yelled, again, and he started throwing rocks at the fox, maybe get it mad enough to release itself. But the fox just turned meaner toward Zeb, not toward the trap. Zeb was crazy as the animal, running in circles with it, screaming at it to set itself free. Then, without thinking, Zeb took out his knife. “All of a sudden I was right there with that fox, and I didn’t know how I got there,” he said, and he had the fox’s neck pinned in the crook of his elbow, and he was still hollering for the fox to set itself free, and the thing turned more and more vicious toward Zeb, and instead of freeing the fox like he wanted to, Zeb stabbed it, over and over, till the fox turned limp and bloody in his arms.
He lay there in the aspen leaves, the trapped, bloodied fox still attached to his chain, dead on his chest.
That’s the part of the story Zeb had told me only once. I came to know it in the same way you remember dreams, how sometimes the most vivid images never find their way to words. They haunt around inside you. It was not because Zeb had threatened me or told me not to tell, like he’d done with other things. That was not why I kept it a secret. It was just that there was something about him that made me want to keep his dark-side secret. As I sat there, the reality of my position stunned me. I knew what Zeb was capable of when he felt trapped.
Just like when I was a kid, I knew that the best thing to do would be to leave, bow out of Polo’s search now that I knew the cops had nothing on me. It was time to let Zeb go once and for all. But it was a decision I could not make. I could not bring myself to leave my brother there, to let him be caught, maybe even killed, by these men. I could not leave my brother. I was what Andy and the guys at WWA called “entangled.” The rule was to never fall in love with your subjects, whether you were studying them in a lab or tracking them. I’d never been good at it, had always named my subjects and felt connected to them. I’d been heavily entangled with my wolves, Ciela and Hector. After years of fieldwork, I even began to feel them in my mind and spirit, and sometimes when I moved, I could feel them in my body, even when I was not tracking them. I’d hear a sharp sound and turn my head with animal-like vigilance. I was moving and acting wolf-like.
I might have been able to live up to what Polo had called me—a master tracker—if I’d had better boundaries, if I could have ever taught myself to care and not to care. But I had never succeeded, even with animals unrelated to me. Now I was tracking my brother; I’d been entangled with him since I was born.
I was unsettled in a way I never had been with the wolves. I heard Raymond’s and Magda’s words—that my brother may have changed, that he may be violent now, even toward me. Shaken, I stumbled as I walked, tripping on the smallest twig. It was one of those clumsy moves that sent me straight to the ground, and when I landed, I saw exactly what I needed to see to keep me on track.
One of the first things you learn about tracking is the simple but relentless awareness of something, anything, out of place. Those out of place things were the keys to the story unfolding. What I’d stumbled upon was miniscule: the twigs of a dried chamisa bush trimmed at an angle that meant a rodent had eaten them. The cuts were recent, and I’d have overlooked them if I hadn’t stumbled. And they led me to notice a tuft of brown hair mixed with white hair caught on the same plant. A few hundred feet from there, tufts of that same hair were scattered across the ground, skittering on top of the fallen leaves and snow, pushed by a slight breeze. I picked up one tuft. It was the fur of a snowshoe hare midway between its winter and summer coat. It was clumped together by skin at the base, not just snagged on a bush, which told me it had been killed by a predator. The skin was still supple; the kill was recent. Beginning trackers looked for blood, but blood was almost always the last piece of evidence that mattered.
Across a clearing in the forest, I saw scratch marks left by a mountain lion after urinating. They were fresh enough that the scent of the urine lingered. It was the musty but frequent smell that day-hikers usually turned up their noses at without ever knowing how close they were to a lion.
I sensed I was onto a mountain lion now. And some instinct told me the lion and Zeb were connected. I thought about the horse I’d seen, the story it had told me of Zeb. This was the hear
t of tracking, a game of connect-the-dots that became so intense that it felt as if the constellations of the night sky had fallen onto the earth. Only the constellations on earth were not stars outlining the stories of ancient gods. They were the tracks of animals and people, an undiscovered mythology waiting to be told. If I could keep connecting the dots, they would complete the story I needed now.
I kept walking, following the tracks of the rabbit and the lion, and they began to frighten me. Shortly after the tracks of the hare ended, the tracks of a human started up. There were no other tracks in the area except those of the mountain lion and those of a man. The man, I had to presume, was my brother. But that alone wasn’t what scared me. It was that the tracks crisscrossed and circled one another in this sort of chaotic pattern. It was as if the mountain lion knew the man was there, and the man knew the lion was there—and they were both conscious enough of each other’s presence to tease, lure, and then avoid. It was as if they were entangled.
I was into the deepest part of the night now. It was no longer snowing, but balls of snow tipped the branches of trees, leaving the trunks inky, barely distinguishable from the darkness. The moon dipped behind the mountains. In that light, everything was black and white, and the tracks themselves, like the boulders and trees, seemed to move. There was a dizzying feel to it. But everything stilled when I saw the outline of a handgun lying in the snow. It had been dropped there recently. I could tell because the snow had stopped falling only ten minutes earlier. No new snow had fallen on the black handle of the gun.
Zeb was nearby. My chest heaved—with excitement, fear, joy—I couldn’t tell. But when I bent to pick up the gun, my legs turned to rubber. I felt twelve years old again. I felt tricked. The gun was so out in the open, so blatantly placed that it had to be a set up. My brother would never drop a weapon like this. I opened the clip of the gun and saw bullets lined up there. It didn’t make sense. Zeb was arming his trackers. His mind had always been a weave of contradictions. But this seemed beyond even his usual extremes. I knew him, not just in my memory but in my blood. I heard the warnings again. “He may be dangerous, even to you.”
